Scientists and meteorology professionals, and educators of every level, have the unavoidable duty of communicating to students of every age this love for the study and observation of the environment as the basis of knowledge and scientific method, and providing them the appropriate tools and also the enthusiasm of the discovery.

From meteorology and with the complicity and support of education community we will be able to involve the whole society, encouraging from the school, to potential amateur scientists of every age the vocation and voluntary commitment to participate in this scientific process of observation and discovery.
﻿Aemet, the State Meteorological Agency, is the ideal civil entity to promote the educational development and citizen science within his scope, becoming the aim of a fifth strategic line, in order to face the research and innovation challenge of the European Union’s HORIZON 2020.

The Production Department of Aemet will develop this initiative of clear scientific, educational and social vocation, defining the basis of the miniMET Project, a necessarily cross-project, with the advice and support of agency areas such as Observation Network, Exploitation and Data Management, Climatology, Training, Innovation, Quality, Communication and Institutional Relationships.

Finally, Aemet and accordingly society itself, will benefit from these return data, as they will constitute an extensive and homogeneous layer of air measurements throughout the territory. This methodology will produce at the same time a way to test and to know if it is possible to extrapolate results from these data, comparing them to the measures from the Aemet official automatic weather stations network, providing valuable added information within its mission to "contribute to the safety of people and goods, and to the welfare and sustainable development of Spanish society".
This network will deliver a huge and valuable feedback data to the scientific, professional and academic environment, within the OPEN SCIENCE paradigm promoted both from the scientific community and civil society, as well as from the European Union, mainly through Citizen Science projects.

Citizen Science and the principles of Research and Responsible Innovation (RRI) are part of the European agenda for research and innovation, HORIZON 2020, which is based on the concept of Science with and for society (SWAFS), promoting active participation of citizens in science and the social commitment of researchers and innovators with society, in order to build effective cooperation between science and society that links scientific excellence with social awareness and responsibility.
Aemet is ready to develop and manage this data network with its collaborative opendata that will fulfill a triple function: collecting data, showing them to the educational community and society through digital OpenMaps on the Internet, and finally sharing them back as open data, as Open Science and Open Data are inseparable concepts.

To achieve this goal Aemet will enable this collaborative opendata input including the related Aplication Programming Interfaces (APIs), as well as will develop a Viewer aplication in the public environment for the visualization of received data georeferred in internet OpenMaps.
﻿The project will promote collaboration agreements with the Educational Community, at autonomic and state levels, to extend this cross-cutting component to the professionals of education, who are the ones who can and are intended to generate and adapt the educational contents of the project, at every educational level.

It will provide didactic materials to several educational areas, mainly:

Technology, ICT (hardware, programming, internet)

Environmental studies: meteorology and climatology

Statistics, analysis of results, comparisons with data from other stations / schools, etc

On the other hand, Aemet, which will define and publish technical specifications as well as proper mounting instructions, will supervise each of the candidate stations to be admitted or not to take part in this school network, and will provide training through courses and seminars to the ICT managers and involved teachers of every center enrolled in the project.

Likewise, and jointly with education authority, Aemet will promote and sponsor the research, development and improvement of station prototypes with annual school competitions to reward the best initiatives, according to the co-creation aspects of the H2020.

﻿In order to materialize this project, we do contribute, from the RasPiMAX initiative, with the definition and building of an air observatories network for schools, environmental study centres, Aemet official collaborators, as well as for amateur meteorologists, proposing several automatic open weather station (AOWS) prototypes, of simple and well-defined construction as technology projects with affordable and reliable elements of open hardware and free software.

RasPiMAX, acronym of Raspberry Pi with GNU/Linux MAX, is a particular educational initiative to spread the use of free software and open hardware, proposing creative and innovative ideas of ICTs for people of every ages. It relies mainly on Raspberry Pi, the miniPC par excellence, with a wide spread in the Anglo-Saxon educational world, and on MAX (from MAdrid_linuX) a versión of GNU/Linux developed by EducaMadrid - Consejería de Educación, Juventud y Deporte of the community of Madrid for his schools.